Scything our pea crop, windrowing it (raking it into rows to dry), and manually feeding the remains into a static threshing machine to extract half a tonne of seeds for next year’s crop has brought back childhood memories of harvest time.
My father’s first harvest as a young tenant farmer at Riverford in 1951 was done with a tractor-drawn binder. This cut the wheat, barley, or oats and tied them into sheaves, which were stooked (stood on end) in groups to finish drying, before being built into stacks to await the static threshing machine, which separates the grain from the straw and chaff. There is a great 1943 film, produced by the Ministry for Agriculture as part of the war effort, which I reckon looks something like this first harvest.
After that first harvest, my father’s binder was towed into a shed in a cider orchard, never to be used again. The first CLAAS combine harvester arrived in the village that year. By combining the binder and thresher into one mobile machine, harvest was completed in one labour-saving operation. Farming moved on; brambles grew over the shed, while the forgotten binder, with its elegant wooden guiding paddles, steel wheels, and rivets, sank into the mud and nettles. In the early 1970s, I was given the task of dismantling the shed and binder to make space for a dung pit for the expanding herd of cows.
Our first International Harvester combine, bought in the 1960s, cut and threshed ten acres on the rare days without breakdowns. It left the straw in neat rows to be baled, loaded, and stacked by hand, to bed the cows and pigs through the winter. We would often still be bringing in the straw in October. This year, with the aid of ever larger and more efficient combine harvesters (and mostly fair weather), the UK cereal harvest is all but done already, with the exception of some late-sown spring oats.
Our half-acre of peas is too small an area to warrant setting up a combine, so we are winding the clock back 150 years, to a pre-binder age of scythes, hand-tied sheaves, and the static threshing machine. This is not romantic Luddism; bought-in pea seeds cost £5000/tonne, around 10 to 15 times the price a farmer might be paid for the crop. The difference just about pays us to bend like serfs and rediscover our inner peasants.
Photo of Nigel Venni, taken at Sacrewell Farm, by Stuart Everett
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